India on Sale: Audio Tapes of Ratan Tata, A. Raja, Barkha Dutt, Vir Sanghvi

The 2G scandal claimed its biggest scalp this week when Telecom Minister A. Raja resigned on November 14. But the resignation answered none of the questions about the system that produced him — and this week, the Supreme Court began hearing evidence that maps that system in uncomfortable detail.

The evidence is a set of recorded telephone conversations of Niira Radia, the corporate lobbyist whose firm Vaishnavi Communication represented both the Tata group and Reliance Industries. Her phones were tapped by the Income Tax Department for roughly 120 days in two stretches — from August 2008 and from May 2009 — yielding nearly 5,900 intercepted calls. On November 15, advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the Centre for Public Interest Litigation's petition seeking Raja's prosecution in the 2G case, placed transcripts of 104 of those conversations before the Supreme Court.

What made the tapes explosive was not just the corporate names but the media ones. Open and Outlook magazines published transcripts showing Radia in conversation with senior journalists — including NDTV's Barkha Dutt and the Hindustan Times' Vir Sanghvi — discussing, among other things, cabinet formation after the 2009 elections. The transcripts ignited a furious debate about how close access journalism had drifted toward influence-peddling.

The tapes offered a rare inside view of how power actually moved in New Delhi: the lobbyist as switchboard, connecting industry, politics, and the press. Raja's resignation removed one node from the network. The network itself survived.